Second City and its nerdy University of Chicago roots: How a ‘lost cause’ grew into a comedic giant

By Ron Grossman

Mar 10, 2019 | 7:00 AM

The cast of Second City -- Bill Mathieu, Howard Alk, Eugene Troobnick, Andrew Duncan, Barbara Harris, Mina Kolb and Severn Darden -- assemble for one of the skits in the new satirical revue entitled, "The Third Programme," circa 1960. (Chicago Tribune archive photo)

Before The Second City’s doors even opened, the Tribune’s nightlife columnist wrote an obituary for the famed cabaret comedy theater. Will Leonard wrote that the theater founders’ previous enterprises, two theater companies and a comedy club, were “all ill-fated ventures,” and he took a pass on The Second City’s Dec. 16, 1959, debut.

The night before, he’d peeked through the window of the theater, in a repurposed Chinese laundry at 1842 N. Wells St., and saw piles of construction materials amid pyramids of wood chips and sawdust. “It looked like a lost cause,” Leonard said.

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Of course, that “lost cause” — improv comedy and the theater founded by a group of University of Chicago students who had performed as the Compass Players — would go on to great success. The Second City turns 60 this year.

But on those opening nights, chaos reigned and success was not obvious. On its second night, as its producer Bernard Sahlins would recall years later for an oral history of the theater, the audience had to step over a rug installer who was nailing down carpeting.

“He was still tapping when the opening song was going on,” said Sahlins, the producer. “I remember him tapping in time to the chorus.”

The Tribune’s Leonard quickly became a cheerleader for Sahlins’ troupe. He proclaimed The Second City’s subsequent shows “witty and wistful,” “brilliant,” “daftest and deftest.”

So why was he initially pessimistic about a nightclub that would go on to nurture such budding talents as Stephen Colbert, John Belushi, Tina Fey, Joan Rivers, Gilda Radner, Alan Arkin and many more?

Probably because it was so out of step with the local entertainment scene. Stand-up comedians did slapstick routines and told mother-in-law jokes. Chicago’s favorite impressionist, Kaye Ballard, reprised Sophie Tucker’s dog-eared schmaltzy songbook and imitated a hostile parakeet.

Bernard Sahlins, director of Second City theater, in 1970. (Earl Gustie/Chicago Tribune)

The Second City took its name from the title of a series of articles in The New Yorker magazine that portrayed Chicago as a vast cultural desert. The Second City theater, by contrast, offered a decidedly highbrow brand of comedy.

One early sketch satirized the University of Chicago bringing back football. Cast member Severn Darden played a nerdy student criticizing a coach who referred to the 40-yard line. Euclid taught that a line goes on to infinity, but on a football field the yard markers are considerably shorter. Therefore they should be called “line segments,” Darden says. The beleaguered coach hands a football to Darden who proclaims: “It’s a demi-poly-tetrahedron.”

In another sketch, Darden was announced as Professor Valter von de Vogelweide, a philosopher giving a short talk on the universe. “Now, why — you may ask me — have I chosen to talk on the universe, rather than some other topic,” Darden would say. “Well, it’s very simple: there isn’t anything else!”

In fact, Darden was well versed in philosophy, being a U. of C. alum. So too were Sahlins, Paul Sills, the Second City’s first director, and Howard Alk, another founding partner and cast member.

It might seem strange that the University of Chicago would be the home turf of comedic revolutionaries. Its students are more known for quoting Hegel than Henny Youngman.

The common denominator between the university and the cabaret was a passion for ideas. Second City was born of a concept: improvisation — or improv theater, as it came to be called — an acting technique developed by Sills’ mother, Viola Spolin.

Trained as a social worker, Spolin discovered that children who were reluctant to talk about their feelings might act them out, if told: “Let’s play a game!” Then she started saying that to actors, devising a series of “theater games” requiring them to react spontaneously to her instructions. In a two-person game, for example, one speaks gibberish that the other must translate into English.

An era of theater in Chicago is born: A stage, a show, an actor (Andrew Duncan) and an audience at Second City, circa 1959. Editors note: this historic photo has white paint added above the actors hat. (Chicago Tribune archive photo)

“You don’t have time to think about yourself,” Spolin told actors. “All your senses are involved in playing a good game.”

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Before her success on Broadway and in movies, Barbara Harris was an original member of Second City and was married to Sills. She recalled Spolin’s method as difficult for being unprecedented. “In fact, and in an ethical way, and quite suddenly, we actors were seemingly being ‘brainwashed’ out of our roles as actors,” Harris recalled to theater historian Jeffrey Sweet, who published her interview and those of other troupe members in his 1978 oral history, “Something Wonderful Right Away.”

Spolin’s approach contradicted the reigning school of theater pedagogy. Method acting held that an actor assigned to play, say, a jilted lover, needed to reawaken his or her memories of similar moments of despair.

Second City depended not on the contents of the troupe’s unconscious but on the ideas rolling around in their brains. Sahlins tested applicants’ fund of literary allusions and historic events.

After a prepared show, Second City audiences were asked to stay and suggest a random subject for one more sketch. The actors would have to take that suggestion and, on the spot, create characters and a short scene.

Improvisations that worked were incorporated into the troupe’s regular shows. It was a formula Sills and company previously developed at The Compass, a bar near the U. of C. campus.

The comedy troupe’s practice of taking improv suggestions from the audience — a practice that continues at most Second City shows today — began on a 1955 opening night in the Compass’ backroom. “The idea was to keep them there a little longer and sell them another drink,” Roger Bowen recalled for Sweet’s oral history.

Ultimately, the Compass Players couldn’t connect with a steady audience. Feeling the leftist winds of campus politics, the troupe dreamed of creating a proletariat audience. Flyers were sent to union halls and one evening a group of steeplejacks from Gary, Ind., showed up. But a culture gap separated the cast from its blue-collar guests, who heckled a routine on French war brides. “It was so remote to them,” said cast member Andrew Duncan “They didn’t have French war brides.”

That show didn’t go on that night, as a fistfight spilled out onto 55th Street. The Compass Players eventually moved their act to the North Side, where it played here and there until 1958.

The Second City theater new auditorium at 1616 N. Wells Street in Old Town looked like this on July 31, with opening night only 36 hours away. Workmen went on 18-hour shifts to get the room ready. (Chicago Tribune historical photo)

Then, in 1959, Sills, Sahlins and Alk found a space to resume their theatrical experimentation, and success followed. The Second City quickly became a conduit to Hollywood and Broadway. The troupe had a New York engagement in 1961 and played London a few years later. And in 1967, they moved into their current space at 1616 N. Wells St.

Meanwhile, the earliest of Second City’s alum were already off spreading the troupe’s quirky brand of comedy far and wide. Severn Darden? Between his TV and movie gigs, he played Severn Darden. In 1967, he met a Tribune interviewer at the Camellia Room, a posh San Francisco restaurant, wearing a turtleneck sweater, corduroy pants cut off at the knees, and a gas mask.

Jack Burns and Avery Schreiber brought The Second City’s shtick to television with ABC’s 1973 variety show “The Burns and Schreiber Comedy Hour.”

And “Saturday Night Live” — the NBC show with more Second City alum than we can count — was already picking off so many of the troupe’s players that Sahlins gave half-serious orders to lock the doors if the show’s producer was spotted on Wells Street.